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America Needs Its Own Truth Committee on Public Debt

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I visited a Grecian isle in July, and it wasn't at all like the Joni Mitchell song. The debt crisis was ramping up, and the government's habit of taking out new loans to pay back old ones—a strategy known as "extend and pretend"—meant the country was $356 billion in the red. Youth unemployment now exceeds 60%, and the economy has ground to a halt.

I went to Greece in the hopes of learning more about what it's like when a whole country is on the economic precipice. I wanted to see what could happen soon in our own debt-ridden American cities as well as in Puerto Rico. In the US, municipal debt more than quadrupled to $3.7 trillion between 1981 and 2012. Puerto Rico has brought the Greek debt crisis closer to home by defaulting on the $72 billion it owes, causing hedge funds to demand the commonwealth close public schools so they can be paid back, with interest.

Curious how Greek citizens and intellectuals are addressing the crisis, I sought out members of a small international team of experts and activists who make up the Orwellian sounding Truth Committee on Public Debt. They have created an audit of the Greek debt that could be a model for Americans whose communities are also struggling to pay their bills—a "menu" of legal arguments Greek officials could have used to justify refusing to pay the debt outright on the grounds it is "illegal, illegitimate and odious" and violates basic human rights.

One of them, Christina Laskardisis, is a young activist turned researcher with Corporate Watch in London. Originally from Athens, she helped co-author the group's recent 62-page "audit" that meticulously deconstructs the country's current predicament. The Committee makes the case that Greek debt isn't the result of reckless spending but reckless lending. "We are trying to break the main narrative that you are the one who is in debt because you screwed up and you are the one benefiting from the bailout," Laskardisis told VICE. "To do that we look at where the money's going, how was it contracted, who benefited from the loan, and so on."

The audit challenges the story favored by creditors the world over: the debtor is to blame. The report shows that lending institutions were well aware that Greece would never be able to pay back its debts, yet made loans anyway. And contrary to the insistence that Greece was "living beyond its means," the audit revealed that only 10 percent of funds borrowed between 2010 to 2015 even went to the Greek people—the rest went to repaying existing loans and interest, recapitalizing Greek banks, and buying off hedge fund debt speculators. The 10 percent statistic was cited widely in the media, increasing international sympathy for Greece's position as it negotiated with lenders this summer.

Another theme of the audit, Laskardisis explains, is the way debt is used as a "lever" by elites to push through policies and programs against popular will, from cutting vital services to privatizing national assets.

Over a decade ago, Greece got screwed by a swap arrangement with Goldman Sachs that made the bank an estimated $800 million while nearly doubling the debt the country put into the deal.

Though its recommendations were not exploited to their full potential, the Committee's idealism got me thinking that in the US, we could use an audit tracking the tricky machinations of Wall Street. How these things affect American cities are little understood by the average citizen; that's why an American Truth Committee on Public Debt is so urgently needed.

Like its Greek counterpart, a Truth Committee on Public Debt in the US would challenge a story beloved by creditors, namely the one that says that American cities are broke or bankrupt, and that because of this fact we have to sacrifice by laying off public workers, shutting down schools, letting our infrastructure fall into disrepair, or paying more to ride the subway. We aren't being told the full truth: Wall Street plays a large role in this cycle.

A man at a playground turned homeless camp in Detroit. Photo via Flickr user jmsmith000

When cities and states need money for big projects they typically issue bonds, borrowing to access the necessary capital. In theory, there's nothing wrong with this process, but it means our communities—and our school districts, water and sewage systems, transportation authorities, public hospitals, pension funds, and other tax-exempt debt issuers—are remarkably dependent on Wall Street.

Banks that underwrite municipal bonds take advantage of this dependency by pushing complicated additional products that often end up costing taxpayers billions in unexpected fees.

One such popular product is known as an "interest rate swap," which can be thought of as a way for issuers of specific types of municipal bonds to hedge against rising interest rates. The problem is, if interest rates go down the bet backfires, and cities get smothered in additional debt. According to Bloomberg, taxpayers have lost $20 billion in swap agreement fees paid to Wall Street over the last five years. To date Chicago has wasted over $1.2 billion on swap payments, including $500 million in "termination fees," and will probably soon dish out an additional $200 million in termination penalties on an interest rate swap that had local schools coughing up $36 million annually. Meanwhile, the city closed nearly 50 schools in 2014 in an attempt to save a paltry $25 million a year.

Or consider Detroit, which declared bankruptcy in 2013. To date, over 40,000 residents have had their water shut off at some point and many more may soon. The United Nations has denounced this as a violation of human rights. This has happened because The Detroit Water and Sewage Department, like the city itself, is deeply indebted. Today, an estimated 40% of all water bill payments made by cash-strapped Detroit residents go toward paying off a 2012 $547 million penalty charged by Goldman Sachs and other banks for terminating interest-rate-swaps.

An audit of some or all American cities could bring deals like these into the light of day—and hopefully embolden residents and their representatives to fight them.

In an interview with VICE, Saqib Bhatti, director of the Roosevelt Institute's ReFund America Project, compared Greece to Detroit. "In both cases you have cities or countries that had broader structural problems and you had Wall Street come in and see the opportunity and target them with deals that were incredibly risky," he explained. Over a decade ago, Greece got screwed by a swap arrangement with Goldman Sachs that made the bank an estimated $800 million while nearly doubling the debt the country put into the deal.

From Oakland, California to Jefferson County, Alabama, advisors and bankers have played up the benefits of complex financial instruments while downplaying the dangers. Sometimes towns get snagged in the municipal equivalent of payday loans. (San Diego school district ended up paying nearly one billion dollars for what was initially a $105 million dollar "capital appreciation bond"—an interest rate of over 1,300 percent.)

An audit of some or all American cities could bring deals like these into the light of day—and hopefully embolden residents and their representatives to fight them. Bhattti and other experts believe that by failing to adequately disclose the risks associated with their products, some banks may be running afoul of the law, which means cities might have both ethical and legal arguments for refusing to pay extortionate finance fees, potentially freeing up billions that could be spent on teachers, roads, and any number of constructive projects.

In addition to informing the public about how municipal debt really works, an American Truth Committee could pose a more fundamental question: Why are cities being forced to borrow money in the first place? The answer is a lack of revenue, which stems from rich people and corporations refusing to pay their fair share of taxes.

Today, cities borrow from the wealthy far more than they tax them, and Wall Street rakes in cash playing middleman. If our cities are broke, regular citizens aren't to blame.

A young man on the streets of Athens. Photo via Flickr user linmtheu

In Crete, a medical clinic I visited was providing services no longer offered by the Greek state because of debt-induced "adjustments." The volunteers I met were an unlikely team: an anarchist couple, a man who owned a toy shop, a radical dentist, and a retired pediatrician.

It was a Saturday morning and mothers sat with their children waiting to get a check up or a vaccine. Christos Kritsotakis, 59, who used to have a small kiosk that sold magazines and sodas, told me he was there because of heart trouble, which he attributed to stress. Before the crisis he was able to provide his family with a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Now unemployed, cash was so tight he had just sold his car for a few hundred euros. The clinic operates without state support of any kind and depends entirely on donations of space, equipment, labor, and even medicine, which is collected by going door-to-door. It's an incredible DIY operation. Health care has become a labor of love in a modern European nation.

And what has happened on that Grecian isle could one day soon happen in our cities. In small ways, it is happening already. The least we can do is demand a full accounting.

Astra Taylor is an EHRP Puffin fellow at Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit that provided support for this article. Follow her on Twitter and check out her book, The People's Platform.


Prepping for the Apocalypse at a Doomsday Training Camp

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This article appeared in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

The young one is shouting again, in Arabic. "La ilaha illa Allah!" The Muslim profession of faith: There is no God but God. His partner, who sounds older, keeps one hand clamped around the nape of my neck. He whispers in my ear, "You're in for it now." Then louder: "Convert or die!"

It is September 10, early morning and hot already, and I am in Los Angeles, seated cross-legged on the grime-caked floor of a white work van as it careens through the industrial vastness surrounding LAX. Shoeless and handcuffed, I huff for breath as the older man stuffs another bag over the white pillowcase already cinched tight around my neck. "This is going to be fun," he says.

One of the four other hooded men with me refuses to convert, which is, apparently, a bad choice. The older man orders his partner to throw him from the van. The back door jerks open, sunlight suffuses the muffling layers of my hoods, and I hear the roaring wind and the screaming tumult of other cars, the two men laughing. Then the door snaps shut and everything goes dark and quiet again.

My turn comes and I stutter something about being an atheist, which is true, foxhole exception notwithstanding. I'm anxious and stressed, the sweat streams from my body, and I can't think clearly. Even I don't believe me. The Arabic speaker wants to know whether I'm married, and I decide to say nothing, just hold up my left hand and waggle my ring finger. He takes this as defiance and smacks me, promises worse once we get to the "secure location."

I sit in silence after that, head down, brooding over my answer, wondering what comes next. Suddenly, the kidnappers shout "drone attack!" and the older one knocks me to the van floor. We shudder to a stop, the back door swings open again, and our captors flee, slamming the door behind them. We are suddenly, and somewhat eerily, alone. Nothing happens at first, our response times slowed by the data overload and the adrenaline still roiling our emotions.

Then I snap into focus and rip off my hoods, gulp hungrily at the fresh air. I get to work on the handcuffs: Smith & Wesson, police-issue, nickel-plated, double spring lock. I've hidden a few metal hair clips, the kind schoolgirls use, pink with sky-blue polka dots, in the bottom of my socks and have a couple hooked onto the slit of my boxers. I fish one out, snap off the top, fold the central clip bar back and forth until it breaks off. I am left with a thin strip of metal. Starting with my right hand, I insert the strip into the space between the cuff's single strand of teeth and the check plate, tightening it a couple of clicks to help work my jury-rigged shim in more deeply. Then, pushing my wrist slightly upward, I pull the shim out and release the cuff. I have the other one off in seconds. I look up and the other men have freed themselves as well. No one says much, but we are laughing, in relief and perhaps a little hysteria, at how easy it was.

Outside the van and into the bright light and deep stillness of a Los Angeles neighborhood populated by blank office parks and warehouses. The sound of men chattering in Spanish floats in from somewhere distant. I have never been here before. A debate ensues over what to do next, and as we dither, I make out the chopping blows of approaching footsteps.

"They're coming back! Run!"

I run.

The kidnappers douse the author with water after he offers the wrong answer to an interrogation question. Photos by David McNew

Two days earlier, Kevin Reeve, founder and director of onPoint Tactical, is seated at a long table in a drab airport-hotel conference room, surrounded by his educational props: handcuffs, an array of padlocks, lock-picking kits, rolls of duct tape, stacks of zip ties, skeins of rope, packs of hair clips and bobby pins, coils of plastic tubing, and more.

I am one of five participants in onPoint Tactical's Urban Escape and Evasion course, a three-day practicum in what Reeve likes to call a "WROL" (Without Rule of Law) situation. The class includes two days of training and lectures and then, on day three, a "practical exercise": a kidnapping, during which each student must free himself from captivity and make his way to safety, wherever that is.

I have not chosen to attend Reeve's class out of any particular abduction fears: I walk with confidence amid the daunting condominium projects, nail-polish sweatshops, and drip-coffee palaces of Park Slope, Brooklyn. I have three children, an unstable job, and a face for radio. There are no chicken coops or nascent computer empires in my garage. You'd have to kidnap most of the neighborhood to make the ransom numbers on me work. But anxiety, the old-fashioned, neurotic preoccupation of the sort my Freudian progenitors taught me to love and loathe, haunts me nonetheless. Pick your concern, false or otherwise, crypto-racist or overtly xenophobic, and chances are it will set my poor heart athump. And so I have come to Los Angeles, and to Kevin Reeve, to calm my nerves, test my wits, and learn a few simple hacks (apologies) for when everything goes awry, which I know will happen, and so do you, inevitably, ultimately, justifiably, tragicomically, and perhaps soon.

Reeve is a burly man in his 50s, with buzz-cut, sandy-brown hair, severe, deep-set eyes, and an incidental resemblance to Clint Eastwood. His wrists, slab-like cuts of beef bristling with wiry, brown fur, have been tightly bound with zip ties. "This is easy," he says. "You're all going to be able to do this."

Reeve removes the laces from one of his boots: 550-pound, tensile-strength parachute cord. Pull all you want, it won't break. Moving quickly, he threads the cord into the gap between his wrists and the zip ties and then fashions the ends of the cord into two-inch loops that he fits over the toes of his shoes.

"Gotta be careful with this," he says. "When it gives, your arms can fly up and break your face."

He begins rapidly bicycling his feet, using the cord to saw at the zip tie. Maybe ten seconds of friction, and then a puff of smoke, the sweet scent of burning plastic, and the tie gives way.

Illustrations by Nicholas Gazin

Reeve is a unique figure within the small world of escape-and-evasion experts. He has no military experience. Joel Lambert, star of the Discovery channel show Lone Target, is a former Navy SEAL. Tony Schiena, creator of the Not Taken anti-kidnapping DVD series, consulted for South Africa's intelligence and paramilitary sector. Reeve, meanwhile, was a Boy Scout, grew up middle class in Pasadena, the son of a teacher and a homemaker. He worked in Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, for Apple, doing whatever "organizational development" and "executive coaching" means. He dropped out, transformed himself from a corporate drone gliding toward retirement and death by natural causes and into a nationally recognized survivalist, tracker, and security consultant. He teaches police officers, soldiers, businessmen traveling abroad, and journalists working in war zones what to do when their lives turn into something akin to an action-film set piece, minus the CGI. Along with Urban Escape and Evasion, onPoint offers classes called Surviving Deadly Contact and Off Grid Medical Care. In 2011, Reeve got his own History Channel show, Off the Grid: Million Dollar Manhunt. Contestants on the show attempted to last a single day in Los Angeles without Reeve hunting them down. None did. "There's very few people that Navy SEALs respect," says Charlie Ebersol, the show's executive producer. "Plus, Kevin's a total badass."

We've already been through handcuffs. Each student has been issued an eight-piece lock-picking kit with an array of tension tools. We discuss the "wriggle-struggle" method for getting out of rope, and later on we cover techniques for garroting, slicing, stabbing, and slashing, using "tools designed to penetrate the body cavity." And now each one of us will have our wrists wrapped with duct tape and then have to get out.

My classmates include a visual effects expert for the movies; an executive at an aerospace company with contracts with the military; a Harvard-educated novelist; and Dan, a gaunt and quietly intense dude who operates his own wilderness-survival outfit with locations around California. Dan listens intently to the lectures, interjects tidbits from his own expertise, and wolfs down bags of licorice whips and other snacks.

I am without question the worst student in the class. I fumble with the handcuffs and struggle to tie the loops with the parachute cord. I have some success opening a padlock once, but then I am unable to repeat it. The contractor quickly gets the feel for lining up the padlock tumblers, and the FX guy says he often brings a pair of handcuffs to bars to impress the ladies (no word on how successful that is). The novelist wriggle-struggles to great effect. And Dan, well, Dan is good at everything.


For more on unique jobs, watch our doc about America's lucrative divorce industry:


Reeve winds the duct tape around my wrists with care. Up close, he has a gentle way. It's not clear if this constitutes the behavior of someone who charges $795 per class, or if I remind him of the ordinary individual he used to be before he grasped his own volition. He exudes conventional male authority, the sense that he knows things that men used to know but often don't anymore. And he's willing to share that knowledge. "You can do this," he says. "I know you can." He grins a little. "But it's going to hurt."

I draw a couple of deep breaths, and then swing my wrists up toward the ceiling and bring them crashing down into my torso. The air rushes from my lungs and I gasp, feel a rush of heat up the back of my neck, and grit my teeth through the pain of the blow. I look down at my wrists: The duct tape has split halfway through.

"That's good," Reeve says. "Once is enough. Try the other way."

I walk over to the bathroom door, and begin rubbing the frayed edges of the duct tape along the corner of the frame. The tape gives way almost instantly. Images from every spy movie I've ever seen, every gangster flick, every action thriller in which the bad guys throw the duct-taped victim into the trunk of a car, flash through my brain. I have, as Reeve puts it, "defeated" the duct tape.

"Lemme see that padlock again," I say, to no one in particular.

Kevin Reeve demonstrates the many uses, some of them lethal, of a 550-pound parachute cord.

Reeve's assistant instructor for the class is one Jerry Cobb, 22-year veteran of the Green Berets, a tall, gruff-looking fellow with a shaved head and an unruly gray beard, dressed like a construction worker and wearing what I can only describe as Desert Storm sneakers. Like Reeve, he is Mormon and lives outside St. George, Utah, in a disaster-prepped house. A former student I spoke with who had visited Cobb at home described his "wall-to-wall" five-gallon buckets of water and emergency supply of lentils. Cobb says he has extensive combat experience, back in his "stupid days." "You can ask him for specifics," Reeve tells me, "but he probably won't give them to you."

Despite his surly disposition and physically imposing figure, Cobb possesses excellent, and much-needed, comic timing. He sits behind us during the two days of lectures, his legs propped up on a swivel chair. He frequently drowses in a light sleep, rousing himself at strategic moments to punctuate Reeve's statements. "I peed my pants all the time in combat," he says during a discussion of fear in war. "Can't tell you how many times." And on the potential for an Islamic State attack on Los Angeles: "I say, bring it. Show us what you got." Then back to bed.

What gets Cobb most excited, however, is not hostile foreign nationals but their domestic counterparts. His opinions on urban street gangs could be taken straight from the "Can you dig it?" speech in The Warriors. "An increasingly large number of these guys have hardcore military experience," he says. "They're bringing it home and training their homies." (Dan agrees and at one point remarks to me that he is disappointed in the location of the kidnapping exercise—Marina Del Rey, Venice, and Santa Monica—preferring to test himself against the city's "bangers.")

Reeve projects an image of a map onto the wall behind him. It depicts the racial boundaries of a major American city: pink sections for whites, blue for African Americans, green for Asians, tan for Hispanics, and a nebulous gray for "other." The map illustrates a situation most of us prefer to think no longer exists: extreme segregation, each community ensconced in its own mono-colored region.

Reeve asks us to imagine a WROL event. It might be in New Orleans, where he worked as a security consultant in the wake of hurricanes Ivan and Gustav. New Orleans, he tells us, is where, after Katrina, more than 600 people died of gunshot wounds. I believe this figure is unfounded. When I ask Reeve where he got it, he replies that it was from a New Orleans policeman, one of the very same folks, he tells us (again bending the truth), who abandoned their posts during the flood and "went home to take care of their families."

Disruption, whatever its form, provokes consistent patterns of behavior, according to Reeve. The "cooperation phase," characterized by post-disaster neighborliness and mutual assistance, lasts 24 hours. We share food, power, and water, tuck in one another's kids. By days two and three, however, cooperation fades, as the awareness of scarcity of resources sets in. The power still isn't on, the canned goods dwindle, no more Band-Aids—any for you means less for me. By day three, if no help arrives, we descend into tribalism. "We are all nine meals away from anarchy," Reeve says.

In major urban areas, Reeve cautions, tribalism hews to strict racial lines; like sticks to like. When WROL begins, we must do whatever is necessary to get back to our color. "I'm not advocating," he says. "It's just the reality."

My fellow students and I—residents, racially speaking, of the pink sectors of Reeve's demographic map—shift uncomfortably in our seats. The tenor of the class has changed. No longer rooted in the sturdy virtues of self-reliance, we are adrift on the turbulent seas of white male paranoia and anxiety. Things return to normal, as they do among men, when we break for lunch.

An array of locking devices and the tools with which they can be broken

The manhunt portion of the class begins on day three. Reeve warned us about the drone attack and the opportunity to escape. We have until 4 PM that afternoon to safely reach an "extraction point." Hunters, which may include Reeve, his assistant instructors, and several former students, will stalk us. Reeve doesn't say exactly what will happen if we are caught, but there are intimations of being chained to a fence in a remote location, or a possible working-over with a stun gun. Complicating matters further, we must confront a series of WROL-related challenges, everything from picking a lock in a public place to begging money from a stranger. After each successfully completed task, we can communicate with Reeve via text message, and he will tell us the next step to safety. (We are forbidden from using our phones for any other purpose.)

For now, though, all I know is that I am supposed to head north, a direction that leads me into a bizarre Los Angeles urbanscape: two cemented-over creeks bisected by a narrow peninsular wedge, and beyond, a sprawling and forbidding swamp—the Ballona Wetlands—guarded by knotted clumps of pickleweed and dotted with wildflowers.

I am walking along a fenced-off access path adjacent to one of the creeks when I freeze. A couple of hundred yards ahead, just past a tree-obstructed bend, I see the outline of a man. He has his back to me, leaning casually against the side of a building. I hide behind some bushes. He could be a hunter, lying in wait. After a moment, he turns around, takes a final drag on his cigarette, and heads inside. False alarm. I feel silly, but I don't know how many hunters Reeve has employed or where they will be positioned. Anyone I encounter could be hostile. I want desperately to escape, far more so than I expected. This may be a game, but recapture would be an excruciating, almost existential, failure. You are not meant to be free.

Across the creek, I notice two figures standing in front of what looks likes a tunnel through the embankment of an elevated freeway: a sheltered route north. I hurry back down the path, looking for a way across the water.

"No, dude. I wouldn't go in there. It's a drainage tunnel." The man is heavily tattooed and leanly muscled, fierce-looking and amused all at once. The woman with him takes off at my approach, hustling into the farther reaches of the peninsula. An interrupted sex worker and a disgruntled client, most likely, but I'm in no position to ask. I keep moving. The ground is littered with refuse, bashed bits of cement, discarded metal bars, beer cans, food wrappers, condoms, and drug baggies. Disruption and danger push us to society's periphery, where the by-products of our daily comforts are made plain. This is an unintentional lesson of the class.

At the end of the peninsula I reach an elaborate homeless shanty. Someone has erected a shelter here with rebar, bicycle frames, cardboard boxes, and grocery carts, all covered with blue nylon tarps. A television antenna juts from the top, and I can hear the drone of a gas-powered generator: They have electricity. Two Chihuahuas rush out to sound the alarm at my arrival. I cluck amiably at them until the woman from the drainage tunnel appears, followed by a wary-looking male partner. They give me directions to cross the swamp, and I thank them and leave.

I reach the Starbucks at around noon, foot-sore and sweaty and not a little dull-headed from skulking about side streets and back alleys to keep ahead of the hunters. I am in disguise: blue board shorts, a sleeveless basketball jersey, red baseball cap set askew on my head, and flip-flops, garb all purchased at Goodwill the night before, along with a pair of $5 plastic sunglasses I picked up, for reasons obscure to me now, at a Party City. Reeve has instructed us to "cache" some necessaries—the clothes, extra shims, my lock-picking kit, and some water—along the prospective escape route. (Reeve maintains his own caches, of weapons and other supplies, in and around his home in St. George. "It's fun to find a good hide. Homeless people do it every day.") When I emerge from the swamp, I move quickly to reclaim my goods, stowed late the previous night behind some tall shrubs at the edge of the marina.

The hunters, as Reeve explained during the lectures, have cellphone photos of their victims. The more we can do to alter our appearance, the better our chances to successfully avoid recapture. He talked at length about the "baseline" of an environment. "This means the particular noise, activity, and speed of a neighborhood," he said. "As long as you match the baseline, you will be invisible." He described a variety of disguise concepts, my favorite being that of the "gray man." Average build, average dress, average demeanor—the gray man is utterly unexceptional, and therefore invisible. "None of you has ever seen a gray man," he said. "If you saw him, he wasn't gray." (Cobb: "Notice we haven't talked about a gray woman? Every woman in the world has her boobs evaluated by a man.") Reeve said I have the makings of a gray man. "Your energy is so withdrawn, so diminished." He meant this as a compliment (I think).

I am crouched behind a restaurant dumpster across the street from the café with the visual effects expert and the guy from the aerospace company. We must rendezvous with a "partisan" who will provide us with essential information. Reeve has given us a code phrase, "Weather's cold, isn't it?" to which the partisan will reply, "Not for the winter." (Note: It's pushing 90 degrees.) The hokeyness of this particular scenario unsettles me a bit. One key element in the kidnapping, for me at least, is the arousal of high stress levels, a consciousness of genuine fear and difficulty. To achieve that, I must suspend disbelief and buy into the fiction of the day. I am, after all, not really kidnapped in a foreign country and fighting for my life. Maintaining that fiction becomes a challenge when spouting gibberish to a stranger at a national coffee franchise. I remind myself to stop being a writer and roll with it.

A smart hunter, it occurs to us, might sit on this location—they know where we are headed—and simply nab us as we arrive. I volunteer to go in alone. That way, if the threat is real, only one of us will be taken. (Don't expect a hero—unless it's you.)

"Gimme twenty minutes," I say. "If I'm not back, assume they got me."

By day three of a [crisis situation], if no help arrives, we descend into tribalism. 'We are all nine meals away from anarchy,' Reeve says.

All I know about the partisan is that he is a man in a black hat. As it turns out, the employees of this particular Starbucks all wear such headgear, as do one or two of the aspiring screenwriters glued to their laptops and sucking down Frappuccinos. I try one of the baristas.

"Cold weather, huh?" I say. He doesn't answer. Just stares. I try again, repeating the phrase exactly. More stare. A little tension, perhaps, in the neck muscles. A glance toward security cameras? Wrong guy.

I step back and notice a young man, a little paunchy and bug-eyed, smirking at me from one of the tables. Wearing a navy-blue baseball cap. The partisan. In the wrong hat.

"It's supposed to throw you. I wanted to see how you'd react," he says. I react with irritation. I ask for a drink of his ice water, which seems to annoy him. He tells me I must complete a "social engineering" task in the café. Reeve has discussed this with us. Part of any escape, he says, will include persuading third parties to help you, often against their own interests. The test the partisan has devised, however, serves only to jar me from the fiction again. Persuade someone to give me the code to the bathroom. A friendly—different—barista gives it up. I pee and return to the partisan.

He asks if I have information about the two other students, and I decide to conduct my own social engineering effort. I say that one man has injured his ankle during the escape and is waiting in a "safe location" nearby. Could the partisan see his way clear to fronting us bus fare? He declines, a little put out by the request, but he looks concerned.

"I'll call Kevin," he says. "He'll come get him."

"Don't bother," I reply, perhaps a little too aggressively. "I was lying. Just wanted to see if you'd give me something."

I get up and leave.

The extraction point proves to be a red-tablecloth pizza spot on the promenade in Santa Monica. I arrive in the late afternoon, as do my fellow students, having picked locks, begged from strangers, wrangled fake IDs, walked many miles, and uttered other inane code phrases. (Q.: "What is the nectar of the gods?" A.: "Mountain Dew.")

No one has been caught, which I find both a personal relief and a mild disappointment. Having someone go down would validate my success. (End a hero.) Reeve conducts a short pizza-and-beer-assisted debrief, with Cobb and the two hunters for the day. Bryce, the younger of the interrogators in the van—Cobb was the other—is a former Marine and Iraq War veteran. He tells me my demeanor in the van was too combative. "I mentioned you to Cobb, and he said, 'He's from New York.'" Rafael, the other hunter, also played the partisan. He is starting a security company in Houston and has flown in to hunt and take another of Reeve's classes. We rehash the scene in the Starbucks, and he claims to have seen through my ruse. "He tried to social engineer me," he tells the others with a small laugh. "Didn't work." (This, as far as I'm concerned, is bunk. He believed me.)

The strain of the day has taken its toll. I am exhausted, physically and mentally. At the same time, I remain jittery and hyper-alert, taking careful notice of the room, looking for entrance and exit points. It's not easy to release the escape-and-evasion mindset. At my hotel later that night, I pace around, shimming my handcuffs and trying to improve my padlock techniques.

Bryce, an interrogator. He's the Arabic speaker.

I fly home the following morning, September 11, still a somber day on which to move through an airport. I experience some unease at the checkpoints, carrying handcuffs and my lockpicking set. Everything goes smoothly, though. Apparently it remains legal, even in this bridled era, to travel with personal restraints and burglary devices. I join the lines of people wearily trudging forward to be body-scanned. The security folk bark their dead-eyed commands about belts and socks and bottles of water. I am calm but vigilant, slightly adrenalized. I walk—slowly, evenly—past a TSA agent to collect my bags. I have succeeded in smuggling two thin shims in the bottom of my socks, pressed into the balls of my feet. I don't expect to be handcuffed midflight. But the future is unpredictable. If something happens, I will need help from no one but myself.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Dicey History of Fans Remaking Their Favorite Video Games

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A screenshot from 'Resident Evil 2 Reborn,' via Facebook

It's invariably been the dream of every gamer who's sat up late, frustrated that their favorite game didn't have a feature they had hoped for, to eventually do what developers could not. In our fantasies, we concoct a world where Half-Life 3 is real and where Silent Hills wasn't canceled. Sometimes developers concede to the constant begging and pleading from fans with surprises like Shenmue 3 or the long, long-awaited Final Fantasy VII HD remake. In other situations, when the developer simply isn't listening or is taking far too long to respond, the road of the fan taking up the mantle as creator is one that has been walked by few and finished by even fewer.

Take the situation of the on-going Resident Evil 2 remake project from Italian indie developer Invader Games. The project, dubbed Resident Evil 2 Reborn, is essentially a frame-by-frame remake of the original 1998 classic by Capcom, this time being brought to life through the Unreal Engine 4 and given the Resident Evil 4, over-the-shoulder style of camera treatment. While the game has been met with excitement from fans ever since the company uploaded their first test footage back in December 2013, comment sections and news sites everywhere have been rampant with speculation of whether the game will be put six feet under like so many fan-directed remakes and reimaginings that came before.

'Resident Evil 2 Reborn', gameplay trailer reveal part one of two

Although Capcom chose not to comment on the Italian project when VICE emailed their UK office, Invader Games representative Michele Giannone tells me that while the idea of being asked to stop production due to copyright issues has been on the team's mind, they're more focused on making the project live up to people's expectations.

"We know that Capcom could stop us at any moment, but right now we want to do our best to show people what we can do. We not only worked on this game for passion, but also to learn how to use a professional engine and create a real video game."

Giannone says that the team started the game due to being huge fans of the series, but are prepared to take their work and move onto something new if Capcom were to bring the hammer down, a trend that's become common for others in their position. After all, cease and desist orders are nothing new in the entertainment industry, and it's completely understandable why a creator would want to protect themselves from having their property stolen, or for another party to profited from without approval.

'Resident Evil 2 Reborn', gameplay trailer reveal part 2 of 2

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But unlike participants in other fandoms, gamers represent a special breed of consumer—their experience is directly linked to what they're able to create within the confines of a game and its mechanics. Their time with a game can stir up varied emotions, their investment dependent on how much they toy around with what the developer has intentionally (or unintentionally) given them. This kind of interactivity is not present in other forms of media—it's not like an indie filmmaker is going to take a shot at recreating the entirety of Blade Runner, although they sometimes go for smaller ventures. Hence, when official video game properties fail to satiate our unending thirst for content, satisfaction comes instead through the likes of the modding, speedrun and remake communities.

While imitations and knockoffs of films and music have been historically banned, made illegal or swallowed by copyright law, fan remakes of video games have been able to slither by in some cases. Half-Life remake Black Mesa is a good example of a situation in which an unofficial recreation was not only allowed to survive, but was taken under the original developer's wing. After fans declared their support for the game, Valve, the creators of Half-Life, promoted the game through Steam, a move that was met with unsurprising success.

Article continues after the video below


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The question of whether to fight against or simply embrace copycat creations is one that has plagued the gaming industry for a long time. Earlier this year, Nintendo killed the production of a Super Mario 64 HD remake; in 2014, both a redo of the original Metal Gear (one that was originally endorsed by Konami) and cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade were found to be dead in the water. In 2009, a sequel to 1995's Chrono Trigger using original sprites from the SNES classic was shut down by publishers Square Enix. And companies such as Ubisoft and EA have come under fire for their relentless use of DRM systems and proprietary platforms in an effort to curb illegal exploitation of official product, something gamers say often inconveniences buyers more than it does pirates.

In the worst-case scenarios, the ultimate battleground is fought where neither developer nor fan (or, indeed, pirate) wants to go: court. Antonio Turco, a lawyer who specializes in copyright and is all too familiar with corporate battles, says that the it's largely up to the original creator when it comes to choosing to pursue the legal route.

'Super Mario 64' HD fan remake – developer showcase

"Obviously, developers don't have to go after anyone if they don't want to, and they often don't want to, with all the legal costs involved," Turco tells me. "But you have to understand that it's mainly a show of copyright protection. If one person can do it, anybody can do it, and then it's just a downward spiral."

Invader Games' scenario may be a bit of an exception now that news about an official HD remake of Resident Evil 2 has broken from Capcom themselves, which might put the indie developer in the clear (and Resi 2 director Hideki Kamiya seems into the fan remake, too). But for those who are not so lucky, Turco tells me that most cases end before they ever reach a court battle, as the fan side of the equation rarely has the money to fight corporate lawyers and developers, frequently aligned with powerful publishers, who have the financial muscle to make independents stand down.

Capcom confirms production of the official 'Resident Evil 2' remake

"The logistics simply aren't there, so a lot of these cases are just settled outside of court. It's rare for a developer to ignore a cease and desist or try and fight against the terms laid out by the legal copyright holder. It's really just comes down to a matter of mercy on the part of the [creator]."

Whether it's the just the fear or actual result of legal intervention that stops fan developers, the message is clear: most unofficial remakes simply won't survive the cut. It is an unfortunate trend, especially when expensive downloadable content and lengthy waits for new games leaves fans not only thirsty for more content, but actually angry with developers who are seen to be stalling, or maximising their takings from the most meagre of offerings. With the introduction of things like Steam Greenlight, this situation may change, but only time will tell if studios and publishers will lower their guard enough to let fans take the reigns of their artistic creations once they're seemingly no longer official priorities.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

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'The DMV on Steroids': Paying Bail in New York Is Next to Impossible

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Last Monday morning, I took two subways and a bus to get to an immense floating jail barge anchored off the eastern shore of the Bronx.

The bus left me on an empty road, in between Hunts Point Terminal Market (which as of 2008 was the largest food distribution center in the world), a Department of Sanitation center, and an endless row of chop shops. The smells of diesel, garbage, burning metal, and saltwater contaminated the air, and served as a stark warning: this was no man's land, and there were no directions out. I walked alone along the side of the littered road, using the faceless gray blockade in the distance as my only guide. Eventually I came to a military-camp-style gate, where a guard pointed to a caged-in passageway rung with barbed wire—visitor row. Follow this for another five minutes, walk across a canopied bridge, and you've made it.

The Vernon C. Bain Center (VCBC), an 800-bed facility that looks like it was stolen from the set of Waterworld, is one of only four locations where you can directly post bail in New York City. The other three are the Manhattan Detention Center (better known as the Tombs); the Brooklyn House of Detention; and Rikers Island, which can be seen just across the bay as you make your way through this other barbed-wire labyrinthe that shelters Rikers runoff. The four facilities house the detained population in New York City, which sits at around 11,400 people on any given day— a correctional system that is bigger than that of some entire states. And with most of the inmates behind bars for nonviolent offenses, 30 percent of all criminal cases in New York include some sort of bail requirement for freedom.

Much of the recent conversation in the annals of New York City government and nationwide has focused not only on why these offenses exist, but also how high bails can trap people behind bars—exemplified most extremely by the tragic suicide of Kalief Browder, who wallowed away for three years on Rikers with a $3,000 bail. But relatively little attention has been paid to the structural and logistical issues family members face when schlepping from one end of town to the other to get their loved ones out of jail. In many ways, paying bail in New York City is as problematic as the bail system itself—another pitfall in a deranged criminal justice system.

I saw this tragically dark comedy firsthand.

Inside a tiny, enclosed room, off to the side of the entrance to the Bronx jail barge, there are eight small black chairs and two glass windows: one for former inmates to retrieve their property, and another where you can pay bail. Behind the latter, one or two Department of Correction (DOC) employees sit inattentively until someone appears at the window.

It was there that I met Alyssa Work, the project manager of the Bronx Freedom Fund, a charitable organization started in 2007 that helps low-income inmates post bail. As her last name suggests, Alyssa gets her hands dirty.

Several times a week, she travels here from East 161st Street, on the other side of the Bronx, to post bail for a client of the Fund. She hops on the Bx6 bus, which, the driver told me on my way over, is usually stocked with those traveling to pay bail or visit an inmate. For Work, the ride typically takes about a half hour. Sometimes, though, she has to pay bail at Rikers, which is a totally different story: that trip, she said, can take nearly two hours each way. And that doesn't count the wait at the jail complex itself.

"It's usually an hour wait when you arrive, because you have to go through security to pay bail on Rikers," she told me as she waited to get an employee's attention. "And then you have to go to a separate building just to wait to get your name called. Then you have to go back to the original building, and hope it all works out."

Work told me that she has waited up to eight hours to pay bail for someone on Rikers—in other words, an entire work day. And that doesn't include travel time, which puts the maximum hourly total closer to twelve. At VCBC, she has waited nearly six hours. And on this particular afternoon—Monday is a popular day to post, Work told me, because it's after a weekend's worth of arrests—the average wait time for people that I observed over a six-hour period was between one and three hours.

Oh, and that was without a line.

One of the most stressful parts of the bail payment process in New York City is the rigidity in how to actually hand over money. The DOC has a list of available options, or lack thereof, on its website. But in most cases, I was told by employees that it was cash only, or cashier's check. Some facilities take money orders, but these have to be precise in payment and location (Keep in mind, too: with money orders and cashier's check, every mistake costs you.)

Only certain locations take credit cards; VCBC did not, but the Tombs in downtown Manhattan does—something the DOC website does not indicate. However, an employee at the Tombs told me there's an 8.95 percent fee (for a $1,000 bail, that's $89.50) should you decide to go plastic. And if you want to take money out of an ATM, which is present at every bail office, there's the familiar burden of a $3 fee.

Don't even ask about paying online.

For many people like Joseph, the bail process is like a losing game of Life: every mistake you make means three steps backward.

The Bronx Freedom Fund pays by cashier's checks, but Work said she has seen people show up to facilities with wads of cash to pay $25,000 bails. The cash has to literally be right on the money, or else you have to find change yourself. And, in the middle of nowhere, like at VCBC or on Rikers, being left without a backup plan isn't always easy.

Thelma Joseph, an older woman in her 60s, found this out the hard way. Not only was her 25-year-old daughter still being transferred between jails for a drug charge, which automatically meant her bail couldn't be posted yet, but Joseph took a $20 cab across the Bronx after work to be told that her credit card wasn't accepted at VCBC. Both reasons rendered her half-hour trip on this late Monday afternoon to free her daughter a complete waste. Joseph was given a number, and told to call it in a few hours to find out just where daughter was actually being held. Then she could come back to this far-off corner of the urban jungle and pay bail.

"That means that I have to pay twenty dollars to go back home, another twenty dollars to come back here, and another twenty dollars to get home after that," she told me, fuming, in a thick Caribbean accent. "That's eighty dollars! How can I afford this?"


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For many people like Joseph, the bail process is like a losing game of Life: every mistake you make means three steps backward. If you bring the wrong form of money, you're left scrambling for dollars. If you forget an ID for yourself and a New York State ID number for the inmate, the game's over. And there are no shortcuts: if you go to the Tombs to pay bail because it's conveniently located in downtown Manhattan, but your relative is, like most of New York City's jail population, somewhere on Rikers Island, the process is slower.

"It makes the most sense to go where the inmate is," Work advised. "Because if you don't, the Department has to fax information back and forth between where you are and where the inmate is. This drags the process on even longer."

The officer at the Bronx barge shrugged when I asked him how much longer I'd have to wait if an inmate I was paying bail for was detained on Rikers. At the Tombs, while an older man snored away, sitting on the only bench in the tiny room, an employee said anywhere between one to three hours more. Work has waited four. Mind you, this is in addition to the original one-to-two hour wait, pending any other error.

And then there's always the chance that the facility is in lockdown, which, at the Tombs and Rikers, we know is a somewhat regular occurrence. A lockdown, whether it's the entire facility or just a floor, further delays the process, because it drags officers who would otherwise be manning the fax machines away from their desk. And from what Work and others told me, it doesn't matter if your relative or loved one is on a different floor: if one of the jail's component parts is broken, the entire system comes to a screeching halt. That includes bail.

One silver lining for New York City's bail offices is that they're open 24/7, so you can theoretically post bail whenever. But even that's misleading.

Work said at 8 AM, the offices here are slower than ever, with a rare sighting of an employee behind the glass window. Past 5 PM—or after most people finish their jobs—is primetime. But for an hour after 2 PM, the employees take an informal lunch break, and that puts everything on hold. Most times, Work added, people posting bail aren't made aware of this, which seems to be the modus operandi of the whole damn system.

"The worst part about it all," she explained, "is that they never tell you how long you're gonna have to wait."

A man named Richard, who refused to give his last name, involuntarily fell victim to this. He drove to the Bronx barge to pay a $500 bail for his nephew around lunchtime, and waited about three hours, even with no one else in front of him. At one point, he peered inside of the window, his hands clasped over his eyes, and asked out loud, "Where'd everybody go?"

When a man named Anthony arrived to pick up his property on Monday afternoon, he was met with a sign that read, "Lunch, be back in one hour." The 25-year-old, who refused to give his last name because of a pending trial, told me he had been released from the Bronx facility earlier that day after being detained on Friday afternoon for swiping his brother and himself in on one MetroCard. At the time, he had one of the 1.2 million outstanding arrest warrants in New York City—in this case, for failing to pay a previous fine—hanging over him.

Like many working New Yorkers, Anthony's mother was unable to leave her job and get to Bronx Criminal Court in the middle of the day. That was the timeframe of Anthony's arraignment, a precious three-hour period when a relative can pay bail at a courthouse, which, according to city data, applied to only 14 percent of all defendants. In some situations, too, a judge will allow the bail to be paid by credit card—but only at the court. Once the defendant is transferred, that privilege is gone, and it's basically impossible to free that person by day's end.

"After bail is set, a person generally has only three hours to come up with the money before being put onto a bus to Rikers," Peter Goldberg, the executive director of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, explained to me. "For low-income families, coming up with a few thousand dollars on such short notice can be daunting, if not impossible. This short time frame forces people to chose between getting a loved one out of jail and attending to all their other obligations: work, school, childcare, etc.""

The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund has a similar model to the Bronx Freedom Fund: a nonprofit that posts on behalf of those facing bails under $2,000. In the coming months, Goldberg and his team will be conducting a study to find out the average wait times to pay bail in New York City. Currently, there is no raw data on the subject.

"Often a family scrambles to raise the funds at great monetary cost only to find out they've arrived too late," Goldberg continued.

Anthony's mom paid a bail bondsman that Friday night, but it still took three days for him to get out of jail. "They said they lost the paperwork or something," Anthony told me with a sigh.

Over the course of reporting for this article, I heard numerous "dog ate my homework" excuses like this. The judge didn't sign off on the bail bond. It was the weekend, so things were slow, naturally. Someone along the way lost the paperwork. Someone forgot to do something.

"The bail process in New York City is like if Kafka wrote a novel on criminal justice," City Councilman Rory Lancman told me.

Another young guy named Richard said it took eight days for his bond to go through, and he didn't even know why. He then waited an hour and a half at the Bronx barge to get a pair of Nike Jordans back.

In both situations—whether you or a relative is paying bail directly, or paying a bail bondsman—the time it takes for the inmate to actually be released is unpredictable. For Anthony, it was three days. For Richard, eight. For others, two or three.

When a group of three Latina women, who had traveled, like me, from Queens to the Bronx barge, just to wait over an hour, said to Anthony and I that they hoped one of the women's husbands might be released soon, Anthony laughed, and replied, "He ain't getting out tonight."

When I visited the Tombs the next day, a bail bondswoman who works across the street told me it depends on the crime—more serious, more time. But, she added, a lot of clients pay a bail bond salesman for the convenience. In other words, the system has gotten so onerous and burdensome that people would rather go into debt than deal with it themselves.

"Those people will just make you wait, and wait, and wait," she told me. "People just simply can't do that."

The bail window at the Tombs jail in Lower Manhattan

That day at VCBC, Work was in and out within a half hour or so. The place was empty when she posted, and she's an exception in the system: Last year, the Bronx Freedom Fund posted for 140 people facing bails under $2,000. Work is someone who pays bails more frequently than most people. But most New Yorkers have never dealt with the inner depths of bureaucracy, nor do they have any idea how to maneuver through it.

"The bail process in New York City is like if Kafka wrote a novel on criminal justice," City Councilman Rory Lancman told me. "You don't know where to go, you don't know what to do, and you don't know when your loved one is even getting out."

Another comparison he offered: "It's like the DMV on steroids."

Councilman Lancman, who represents an eastern swath of Queens, is the chair of the Courts & Legal Services Committee in the New York City Council. He was behind the recent push for a $1.4 million citywide bail fund, which, this past June, was approved in the City Council's budget. (The model is based on the Bronx Freedom Fund.) But he doesn't want to stop there.

After hearing numerous tales from constituents, all of which sounded awful similar to the ones I told Councilman Lancman about during our interview, his office has decided to try for some small tweaks to the system so that it'll run at speeds actually fit for the modern age. How mind-numbingly simple they seem speaks to the madness of it all.

"It's amazing that in 2015, you cannot post bail by credit card or on the web!" he exclaimed to me over the phone. "You can buy literally anything online with your credit card. You can pay any of your bills on the web, using encrypted payment methods. But you can't post bail for a human being."

"Most people are shocked that they don't exist," he continued. "So one of our ideas is just to add those payment options." And also: get rid of those damn fax machines.

The shock hits on what Lancman calls a "black hole of information." I told him Joseph's story; how she arrived not knowing if her daughter was in jail, or that her credit card didn't work at that facility, sending her back across the Bronx in an expensive cab. These people, he said, are in dire need of vital information that should be provided either via email or text. He called the current system "byzantine and opaque."

Another reform might be to expand BEX, a program set up by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency that extends the time defendants can sit in arraignment court if the court knows a relative or loved one can get there to pay his or her bail in time. "We don't want a lot of these people to be taken to Rikers Island," Lancman added.

Councilman Lancman hopes to meet with the de Blasio administration, which he applauded for its work on summons and Rikers Island reforms, after Labor Day to discuss solutions. A City Hall spokesperson said the administration is "very interested" in addressing the technical issues of paying bail, and are in "the early stages of research."

It's probably easier to buy a gun online than free a loved one from jail.

Making that process more seamless, Lancman added, is a win-win for everyone involved: Department of Correction employees, who would have fewer people in their jails to oversee; the inmates, who, of course, wouldn't be in hellhole jails anymore; the family members, who might be able to see their loved ones sooner rather than (much) later. And the city, too—the logic being that a family member should be able to pay the city as quickly as possible, so their relatives and inmates can be spared from taking on costly bonds.

Because not only does a clogged system have a disastrous impact on those looking to post bail, be it economically or emotionally, it also costs the public a shit-ton of money.

How much? The city pays $450 a day to hold an inmate in a New York City jail. The average stay is 24 days, and, in 2013, nearly 16,000 people were unable to make bail set at $2,000 or less for nonviolent offenses. Within this total, 6,000 people were unable to make bails set between $500 and twenty bucks.

While these numbers reflect on other realities—that most inmates swept up in the "broken windows" policing dragnet are from low-income, minority neighborhoods—they also cast a shadow over the bail payment process. In a way, it's no surprise that 45,000 people each year in New York City can't post, because even if many wanted to, obstacles are all over the place. It's probably easier to buy a gun online than free a loved one from jail. "It's almost cruel to say it should be user-friendly," Lancman said.

Again, Lancman said, most people aren't like Work; that is to say: an expert in this excruciatingly exhaustive experience. "Ordinary people don't know the world of bail bonds, or what they need to bring," he argued. "For a person who is able and willing to make the bail, why should it take days? Is this really in the interest of the person?"

The bail process is just another burden for the impoverished in New York—as if an assembly-line court procedure and a hellish summons system weren't enough. And just sitting there, watching it unfold in front of you for hours on a terrifying floating jail barge somewhere in the Bronx, it's genuinely hard to explain the theater of it all.

"It's not just the truth, but the operating principle, of our criminal justice system," Lancman said, "And that is, the process is the punishment."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

English Neo-Nazis Were 'Completely Humiliated' at a Liverpool March This Weekend

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Neo-Nazis penned into a left luggage section in Liverpool this weekend (All photos by Oscar Webb)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Neo-nazi group "National Action" (NA) were forced to abandon their "White Man March" in Liverpool this weekend when anti-fascists turned out in force to hand their racist asses to them. The anti-fascist crowd blocked NA from leaving the train station, threw bottles and eggs at them and broke through police lines to punch them in the face.

NA, whose members openly idolize Adolf Hitler, had about 50 supporters show up in Liverpool on Saturday for their much anticipated demonstration. They were completely outnumbered by anti-fascists, who prevented them from even leaving the train station they'd turned up at.

Members of the Nazi group brag online about attending ISIS-inspired training camps where they practice fighting, learn to use weapons and discuss Nazi ideology. In the flesh, they were not particularly scary: Fights that broke out when the crowds met were mostly won by the anti-fascists, dispelling the hype NA has built up about itself online as a group that "only bullets will stop." In fact the truth is they can be stopped with some well-aimed eggs and punches.

National Action's build-up to the march was sinister and menacing, which made the events of the day all the more funny. A letter sent to the mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson—which the group later denied sending—threatened that the city would "go up in flames" if he banned their march. NA's Facebook page announced, "in years to come, your grandchildren will speak [of] this day and how NA made history. Prepare yourselves."

This is what that predicted turning point in history towards National Socialism in Britain ended up looking like. NA, on the left of this picture, were penned into a corner of Liverpool Lime Street station by police "for their own protection" while a wave of anti-fascists tried to get at them, chanting, "if it wasn't for the coppers you'd be dead".

The day began at 11 o'clock when 200 to 300 anti-fascists from the Anti-fascist Network rallied at St Luke's church in central Liverpool. From here, the anti-fascists marched down the road to Liverpool Lime Street station, where members of NA were arriving by train.

At first the police managed to stop any of the anti-fascists from getting into the station, and the two opposing groups had to make do with swearing at each other through the windows of the station's Wetherspoons.

But pretty quickly, the hundreds-strong group found another, un-policed, entrance to the station and made a rush for it.

Once inside, the anti-fascists pretty quickly found NA penned into their corner, symbolically in the doorway of an unfortunate left luggage shop.

The anti-fascists started throwing water bottles at NA, then someone who had brought some eggs started chucking them. Bananas also got thrown—a brutal attack to the pride of any self-respecting white supremacist. Needless to say none of them had the presence of mind to style it out like Dani Alves.

This guy got covered in milk, which probably wasn't how he had been planning on celebrating his whiteness.

At this point the police decided that NA needed to be further cordoned off and bundled them into the lost property shop with the barrier put down. As they waited in their Nazi pen, they presumably had some rather awkward conversations very, very close to each others' faces.

Then the police decided to escort the group out of the station. As NA came out of their lost-property refuge, there was a massive push by the crowd and the police lines finally broke. It was pretty chaotic for a couple of minutes as NA, the police and the anti-fascists at the front of the crowd were pushed together into a dead-end of the station. In this crush, punches were thrown between the two groups and it nearly turned into a full-on battle before the police managed to regain some control.

Covered in egg, and faced by a crowd about ten times as big as them baying for their blood, NA looked pretty shaken at this point. One young member was bleeding, having been punched in the nose. He was frantically complaining to the police that some of NA needed to use the toilet having been contained for two hours. Holding his bloodied nose and clutching his piss-filled bladder—it looked like a pretty miserable way to spend a Saturday.

NA did a bit of half-hearted seig-heiling before the police pushed the crowd back and managed to escort them out of the train station and into a transport police office next door. Presumably from here the police waited for the anti-fascist crowd to disperse and send NA home on trains.

The anti-fascists meanwhile, feeling truly victorious, marched down to Liverpool's waterfront to let off smoke bombs and pose for photos.

NA's normally busy social media presence has gone a bit quiet following the foiled march: National Action north-west's Twitter said that anti-fascists "call us fascists [but need to] take a long [look] at the video footage and a long look in the mirror," adding that anti-fascists are "disgusting."

Throughout the day, six people were arrested.

Speaking exclusively to VICE, a spokesperson for the Anti-fascist Network said, "We've seen a surge in neo-Nazi activity and anti-fascists have shown we're more than ready to oppose it. The event has already been dubbed the 'Battle of Lime Street.' This might be the biggest anti-fascist victory in the UK for 20 or 30 years. It was a total victory over NA, who are completely humiliated. NA came out of the internet and now the internet is ripping the piss out of them on a scale they could never hope to reach."

Still clearly buzzing from the day's events, the spokesperson continued: "We want to thank the people of Liverpool. Particularly members of the black community, trade unionists, Irish republicans, and football casuals who joined us in taking mass direct action against a neo-Nazi march.

"The struggle against the far right in the UK is far from over. In Dover on September 12, racists from all over the UK are coming together to whip up hatred against migrants. Nazis are already talking about getting revenge for Liverpool."

NA have also said that they'll hold another White Man March in Liverpool in two weeks' time. That seems kind of unlikely given the pasting they received on Saturday. If it does happen, it'll be interesting to see if they make it out of the station this time.

Follow Oscar on Twitter.

The Hunt for Narco Subs

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The Hunt for Narco Subs

Reports of Huge Explosion in Thai Capital of Bangkok

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: Half of Young People in the UK Say They're Not Completely Straight

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Photo by Eric Rolph, via.

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According to the results of a new poll, nearly one in two 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK say that they're at least open to the idea of being attracted to someone of the same sex, with 19 percent of the overall population also placing themselves somewhere in between.

This isn't to be mistaken for a measure of bisexuality in the UK: 89 percent of the overall population would still call themselves "heterosexual." Like, if you asked them down the pub. What it does mean though, is that a younger generation of people are starting to view sexual orientation as fluid as opposed to binary.

The survey conducted by YouGov asked participants to rate themselves along the famous scale devised by sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whereby "0" means massive hetero, "6" means massive homo, and everything in between is a little blurry.

The results support the idea that we're entering an increasingly free-thinking-I'll-fuck-anything-sexy-with-a-pulse era when it comes to how we view our sexual identities. However, the study also found that 28 percent of people who self-describe as totally heterosexual believe that "there is no middle ground—you are either heterosexual or you are not," demonstrating that not everyone believes sexuality is on a sliding scale.


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VICE Talks Film: Actress Bel Powley on 'Diary of a Teenage Girl'

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Set in a mid-70s San Francisco, the new film Diary of a Teenage Girl is an unflinching and deeply sincere coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old's sexual awakening and secret relationship with her mother's boyfriend.

VICE sat with the movie's breakout star, Bel Powley, to discuss the several challenges of her performance, working with Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård, and taboo subject of female sexuality in films.

Diary of a Teenage Girl is in theaters now.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: This ‘New’ Chinese Game Console Is a Wonderfully Shameless Knockoff

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A photo of the OUYE, from the console's Kickstarter page

Want to read more about video games? We've a whole section dedicated to them, right here.

Remember just a few weeks ago, when China announced that gamers in the country could now buy their own Xbox One or PlayStation 4, after a national ban on the sale and distribution of consoles imposed back in 2000 was finally lifted? Well, the legal status of said machines hasn't stopped the perhaps not-so-bright sparks behind the new Chinese games system OUYE from offering their fellow citizens a fantastically brazen rip-off that not only "borrows" the PS4's shape, but is quite clearly "influenced" by the Xbox One in the controller department.

I mean, just look at it, up there, in all its glory. Drink it in and sweat it out. Incredible. Pass a poster for this, on the high street, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a PS4. I mean, it's not quite all there—but the shape, the slant, the angles, everything from a first-glance perspective checks out. But then there's the pad—so much like the Xbox One's that you have to really zoom in to notice that there's a bunch of extra buttons on there, around the "proper" controller's central "X" button. What do they do? We will likely never, ever know. There are differences then, but come on: This is surely the most wholeheartedly shameless that one of these dodgy products has ever been.

OUYE is currently being Kickstarted—find it here. Now, not being able to read a word of Chinese, I'm turning to Kotaku for information on what makes this box of tricks tick, as it's through them that it came to my attention this morning. Over to the site's Luke Plunkett:

It's a hunk of copyright-infringing plastic that, judging from the games on show (and the price, seeing as you can pick one up for around £65 [$100]), looks like it's running on some modified version of Android. We've seen some ballsy knock-offs coming out of China over the years, but this one's balls are particularly brassy.

The same Kotaku article features a few translations by reader "ZhugeEX" from the OUYE's Kickstarter campaign. Regarding its specs, the machine is said to be slightly more powerful than the recently canned OUYA console, which also ran on Android. Its makers, based in Shenzhen, took 15 months coming up with the OUYE's design, which is just... just... I can't even. (Do we still use "I can't even"? Is that OK?)

While we're here, and before the OUYE disappears completely under a mountain of cease-and-desist paperwork, or simply isn't backed enough (come on, people), let's take a quick look at some other fantastic Chinese "tributes" to games consoles past.

The PolyStation! (via)

The PopStation Portable! (via)

And my personal favorite, the WiWi! (via)

Tweet us your own choice knockoffs, if you like, to either address below. There have been millions.* (*Quite a lot, at least.)

While you might conclude that the OUYE is just another entry in this long line of awful consoles to come out of China, I can't help thinking, as it's the one-year anniversary of a Very Unfortunate Gaming Event, that it's some sort of meta commentary on how we, as a diverse group of games-loving people ultimately joined by our passion for a medium that can only grow during our generation, really can work out our differences, if we try. I mean, look: here's the two biggest current-gen consoles, smashed together into a single, functioning (I assume) unit, learning to get along in harmony. Or, just maybe, I'm overthinking this. I should probably have breakfast.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Going Bald Sucks, but Going Bald When You're a Woman Sucks Harder

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Photo via Flickr user Daniel Oines

This article was originally published on VICE Spain.

It happened suddenly. It wasn't one of those treacherous situations that start little by little, where you don't realize there is a problem until you are screwed. Sure, there was that couple of weeks when I noticed a bit more hair than usual clogging up the drain after a shower, but I didn't pay much attention to it. I had other things to worry about. Things like looking for a place to live after my boyfriend had left me with an apartment that I couldn't pay for by myself.

There was a definitive moment in the story of my alopecia when I knew something was seriously not right. That day, I woke up late and had to move like a maniac to get to work on time. I hurried in the shower, jumped out, wrapped a towel around my head, and when I took it off to brush my hair, handfuls of strands started to fall out one after the other. I felt like I was in a fucking nightmare. I carried on brushing my hair, hoping that it would stop shedding from my scalp. Within ten minutes the sink's surface was covered by a pile of long brown strands. I took it with both hands and made a big ball out of it. I starred at it for while, I was so amazed by it. I even smelled it.

My heart was pounding, and with my stomach in my mouth I went toward the mirror to see just how bad it was. I pulled my hair back with both hands and, horrified, saw that one side of my head was largely bald. I didn't understand. How could my hair fall out on just one side? These things happen symmetrically, don't they? Isn't that how nature works? I couldn't believe it was real.

I arrived at work crying, partly out of panic and partly out of shock. Hoping it was all some kind of hallucination, I pulled all my hair back again and asked my closest work colleague:

"Which side is set back the most?" I asked. I'll never forget the look she gave me, it was awful.

"Well, the left side. What's happened?" she said.

I had no idea what was happening to me.

Days of frustration and distress followed this episode. Within a few weeks, my once-luxurious thick fringe consisted of just a few hairs. My crown had also started to shed. Nothing seemed to help either—not the complex hair loss nutrients that the pharmacist recommended nor the special shampoo. So I decided to go to the doctor.

In the doctor's office, I went through the same motions I had found myself repeating to everyone I trusted. Hands on both sides, push my hair back, sad face: "It's gone. Look, on the crown," I said.

"Are you very stressed?" the doctor asked.

"Well, yes. I have been a little nervous lately."

I didn't think twice before telling the doctor that only a few months ago my boyfriend (the man who I had shared the past five years of my life with) had all of a sudden disappeared. From that moment on, life had not been awesome.

The look he gave me, the tone of his voice, and the words that he carefully picked showed compassion for the girl who sat in front of him. A woman going bald, in the prime of her life, can seem like a catastrophe—a curse even. He told me that we would get some tests done to check my hormone levels and that we would figure this out. There was nothing to worry about, he assured me.

The tests didn't show any abnormality in my androgen levels (the masculine hormones), so I didn't have to be treated for androgenic alopecia. That would have been really shitty because it would mean the hair I had lost would never grow back. They couldn't give me any other explanation as to why this was happening. If it was stress, then it would be something transitory that I would have to put up with.

When you're told that your hair is falling out because of stress, it only leads to more stress. It's a vicious cycle that drives you crazy. You try to calm yourself down, thinking this must all just be a bad dream. But finding balls of your hair on your pillow, in the shower, on the sofa, in the sink, in every fucking corner of your house doesn't exactly help you keep calm.

My baldness turned into an obsession. I couldn't think about anything except for going bald. I was depressed and cried all the time. I stopped going out and didn't want to talk to anybody. I spent hours of my days online, either researching or talking to other balding women on chat forums. I desperately sought testimony that would reveal the existence of some miracle product. I was terrified when I reached the peak of this whole tragedy: the wig.

It had been four months since that fateful day in the shower. I had lost more than half of my hair and the left side of my forehead was set back much more than the right (something no doctor managed to explain). The hairs on my crown had been wiped out to reveal a spot approximately six centimeters in diameter.

I tried a thousand different ways of styling my hair to cover up the bald patches: side partings, low ponytails, strategically-placed up-dos.

I also took up a treatment based on Minoxidil, and crammed in as many vitamins as I could. I tried to eat as healthy as possible, meditation, and even psychotherapy. When ten minutes into our first appointment, the psychologist told me that I should accept what was happening to me, I didn't know how to react.

"Close your eyes and repeat that this may never be resolved. Make a space for how this phrase makes you feel. Allow yourself to feel this emotion." What the fuck was this woman saying to me?

I left crying like a baby. That session was the straw that broke the camel's back. Until that moment I hadn't thought that this horror might last forever. I cried and cried until I was empty. I had the feeling that nothing was worth it, that I would never be happy again, and that scared me a lot. I was worried I might go crazy.

I can't say when exactly something in my head changed, but one day I came to terms with the fact that nothing was left to be done except take control of my life again. I had no idea if my baldness was going to resolve itself, but I did know that I couldn't keep going on like this.

I have now been semi bald for eight months and, I'm not going to lie, I still feel like shit. But it's also true that I am better. My hair is growing back, though with nowhere near the same thickness as before. I have learned how to cover up the bald spots and I have figured out how to have sex without freaking out my partners. I think, hands down, I have accepted this problem just like that mean psychologist said I should. Does this mean that I am happy? No, I'm not: Going bald is a gigantic pain in the ass.

At Amazon, Employees Treat the Bathroom as an Extension of the Office

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At Amazon, Employees Treat the Bathroom as an Extension of the Office

We Talked to Dean Wareham About Scoring Noah Baumbach's Movies

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We Talked to Dean Wareham About Scoring Noah Baumbach's Movies

Narcomania: Addicted Dealers and Organized Gangs: What Makes Certain Drug Scenes More Violent Than Others

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A big bag of drugs being weighed up. Photo by Andoni Lubaki.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The UK drug trade's body count is nothing compared to the slaughter happening across the Atlantic. Despite all the YouTube gun fingers and teenage drug dealers claiming they'll "shank a man" for also selling ten bags in their neighborhood, only six percent of homicides in England and Wales (around 30 deaths last year) are connected to some form of gang activity. In the US, the number of gang-related deaths is estimated at around 2,000 a year. In Mexico in 2010, there were more than 13,000 cartel-related homicides.

That said, while the narcotics game might not be a particularly murderous one over here, there is certainly an undercurrent of violence involved—though it's not anywhere near as dramatic as the landscape of turf wars and tear-ups the internet's junior slingers seem keen to convey. Instead, the violence takes a more insidious form, where the victims are often the young and the vulnerable.

This was hinted at in a joint report published last week by the UK's National Crime Agency and National Police Chiefs Council, which looked at how city gangs are sending teenage runners to exploit out-of-town drug markets. It said many of these kids are being exposed to violence and coercion as a result of working in such a hazardous illegal market. But what is it that makes one drug market more violent than another? Is it the presence of organized criminals, crack cocaine, or sadistic debt collection strategies? Is it the availability of weapons, or perhaps the lengths drug users will go to in order to get their next fix?

Criminologist Ross Coomber set out to answer this question by comparing the experiences of those involved in drug markets in two English urban coastal areas, Plymouth and Southend-on-Sea. His report, A Tale of Two Cities: Understanding Differences in Levels of Heroin/Crack Market-Related Violence, uses interviews with local drug users, dealers, police, and drug workers to give an insight into what makes a drug market tick, and what it is that makes it violent.

Plymouth, an old naval city on England's southwest coast with a population of 300,000, shares some characteristics with Southend, a large holiday resort town with a population of 176,000 on the southeast coast. Both are surrounded by countryside and detached from major cities. Both have seen better days, with areas of concentrated deprivation in which their drug markets are based. Southend is less isolated from a major city, being 40 miles from London, while Plymouth is 120 miles from Bristol.

Coomber found there was a marked difference between these two drug markets. In Plymouth, almost all of the street-level drug sellers were locals addicted to heroin; they sold drugs to buy drugs. In Southend, however, the vast majority of street drug sellers were young, non-addicted, out-of-town runners who sold heroin and crack purely for profit.

The way these two markets were run had a direct impact on violence. The "user-dealer" dominated drug market in Plymouth, it turned out, was being controlled at arm's length, predominantly by gangs from Liverpool, 300 miles up the M5. The Liverpudlians stepped into the city 15 years ago, shortly after a string of local dealers were jailed in a police clampdown following a bloody turf war. London gangs attempted to muscle in on the action soon after by introducing crack to the market, but made the mistake of sending young black men to what, at the time, was a virtually all-white city. Armed with intelligence, police sat outside Plymouth station in unmarked cars and picked the dealers off one by one. It's one of the reasons why there are still very few crack-only drug addicts in Plymouth today.

Heroin, however, is a different story. With 2,000 regular users spending, on average, £20 [$30] a day, Plymouth's street drug market is potentially worth about £280,000 [$437,000] a week. Liverpool gangs bring the heroin down to Plymouth, where a wholesaler stationed in the city is responsible for distributing the drugs among a group of trusted user-dealers. Like most out-of-town drug operatives, in order to blend in and leave without a trace, the wholesaler sets up shop in the home of a drug user, a practice called "cuckooing." They give the tenant free drugs in return for the use of their home as a stash house, and as is the nature of these things, by the time the police come a knocking, the wholesaler is long gone.

Photo by Marco Tulia Valencio

Cops are hopelessly outmaneuvered by the drug crews. When police managed to take out one of the main drug gangs in the city, officials at Plymouth City Council decided to see how many weeks it would take for the drug trade to get back to normal. They didn't have to wait that long: it took three hours.

Wholesalers are responsible for running their own mini-fiefdom, which includes administering punishment beatings to people who don't pay their debts. Every three months, the Liverpool bosses move their wholesaler onto another city, to keep the police guessing and prevent them from establishing their own rival business. Coomber found that the Liverpool gangs had a "light touch" policy toward Plymouth's drug market, leaving drug users to serve up to drug users, meaning turf war-type disputes were therefore pretty rare.

This was not the picture in Southend. In the Essex town, home to 1,150 addicted heroin and crack users, the market was dominated by a procession of young, entrepreneurial crews commuting the hour-long journey from London to sell by the seaside. Violence was much more frequent than in Plymouth, as there was increased competition between gangs to supply Southend's heroin and crack users. However, most of the violence was not between rival dealers, but between dealers and users, mainly because they didn't like each other.

"By far, the most cited aspect of drug market violence was not seller inflicted, as much market stereotype would lead us to expect, but instead it was associated with robberies and assaults on younger drugs runners, or 'shotters,' who were targeted by heroin and crack users," said the report.

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Layla, a 36-year-old heroin user from Southend, told Coomber: "There is a lot of violence, there's a lot of robbery from drug dealers... the young lads, because a lot of it is youngsters, people will phone up to say, 'I want five of each.' So they'll come out with ten shots, and the person that's scoring off them, they'll hold a knife to them, or just blatantly rob them. Or they'll find out where they're serving up from, because they move from people to people's flats, and they'll just go in, balaclava, in there, with a hammer, do the young lad, or young girl, whoever it may be, and just rob them of their drugs. It goes on all the time; every week you hear about one person being robbed."

In November of last year, 24-year-old drug dealer Anton Levin, from Dagenham in east London, was stabbed to death after being lured to a flat in Southend. His three killers had intended to ambush and injure him in order to steal all his drugs and money.

Part of the problem in Southend is that, unlike Plymouth, the buyers and the sellers have no regard for each other. Coomber was told the London boys treated the Essex "junkies" with disdain. They talked down to them, sold them poor quality drugs, had an intimidatory attitude and often kept them waiting for drugs as they faced withdrawal. That said, the violence worked both ways. "It is a violent scene here. You got to be careful. I've been stabbed in the leg. I've been cut down the leg with a Stanley [knife]," Byron, a 36-year-old heroin and crack user, told Coomber.

When the Londoners cockooed drug users' homes to establish bases for supply, it was not by mutual consent, as in Plymouth, but instead tenants were coerced into having their homes taken over, before being abused and eventually kicked out.

The report found the London dealers, who had been coming to Southend for the past decade, also had a reputation for carrying out "predatory sexual activity" toward vulnerable women and girls. Glyn Halksworth, the strategic manager of drug services in Southend, told me women face significant violence from drug dealers, including kidnap and rape.

"We've noticed, from speaking to people in drug services, that those on the peripheries of gangs, particularly young female drug users, end up getting kidnapped, beaten, hospitalized, and raped," he said. "We see women who get involved after being given freebies, and who are dissuaded from going to rehab because they have too much information. There is a fear factor, so this does not often get reported to the police."


WATCH: Combatting America's Opioid Crisis—Heroin's Antidote:


Many of those interviewed by Coomber remarked that most of the London dealers in Southend were young black men, often identified as being "Somalis." This was reflected in a flurry of headlines four years ago in the Southend Echo, such as "Somali gangs bring back terror to the tower block" and "Town drugs ring run by Somalis." While not all of the London drug gangs coming to Southend are of Somali origin, Somalis have a large presence between London and Essex, particularly in the key waypoint of Basildon.

Last year, Mohamed Hassan, the leader of a Somali drug gang that ran drugs in Basildon, was jailed after what the papers called a "Reservoir Dogs-style attack" on an undercover detective in 2012. The officer only escaped after jumping 12 feet through a first floor window.

I spoke to Adan, a youth worker working with Somali drug dealers in south London, to ask him if the London Somali crews are still heading out of the capital to find new business. "A lot of the south London boys, from Woolwich and Streatham, they go to Southend to sell drugs. Their elders control a lot of the Essex line out of London, through Basildon. They ain't the battle-hardened soldiers of Mogadishu or Al-Shabaab; they're just kids who want to live the hip-hop dream. They want the honey and the money, and to show off about it on social media. Some of them are not streetwise; they don't understand heroin—they think dealing drugs is like working in a shop."

Despite a succession of high-profile police raids on drug gangs, the situation is getting worse. In January, Southend's District Commander Chief Inspector, Simon Anslow, admitted that the town had become a "drug dealing playground" for London gangs, who had been responsible for a violent "crimewave." Between July and September of 2014, there were six stabbings in Southend, all thought to be drug gang-related, two of which resulted in deaths.

"There has been a proliferation of gangs selling drugs in Southend, and the violence connected to that," said Halksworth. "We are seeing more foot soldiers, and gangs have many tendrils into the community. We are working with police to tackle this, to see what we can do to support them."

Both Coomber and the NCA's reports reflect an issue that is only now bubbling to the surface, that the drug trade is a zone into which vulnerable drug users and low-level drug dealers are sucked in; but for whom there is little compassion in the courts, or from wider society.

A quarter of all people convicted of supplying class A drugs in 2010 were 21 or under, and the number of teenage drug dealers arrested, charged, and locked up for drug dealing is rising every year. In the UK there are, at the very least, 70,000 retail-level drug dealers, many of whom end up selling drugs via a mix of coercion and because they have little hope of getting a job in the legitimate economy. They enter a brutal world where young women are exploited for everything they have. That many vulnerable girls gravitate towards this scene and become dependent on it exposes the inadequacy of a welfare system that should be looking out for them.

Meanwhile, it says much about the reaction of teenagers today who are faced with a total lack of opportunity—compared to their predecessors who got hooked on heroin in the 1980s and 1990s—that they are far more likely to be selling it now than injecting it. But with that comes a whole new set of dangers, not only for them, but for others who get wrapped up in their world.

Follow Max on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Exclusive: Hear Soundtrack Selections from Mike Bithell’s New Game, ‘Volume’

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Cover art for David Housden's 'Volume' soundtrack

Volume, the new game from Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell, is released tomorrow (August 18), and here VICE Gaming has a neat little preview of its music, composed by the BAFTA-nominated David Housden.

The 2012-released puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone was a huge breakthrough for British developer Bithell, winning plaudits aplenty and a BAFTA award in 2013 for Danny Wallace's performance as its narrator. Housden's score for the game attracted praise, too, and he's reconnected with Bithell for Volume, a stealth game that mixes the mythology of Robin Hood—you play as Robert Locksley, against Guy Gisborne—with a high-tech, near-future aesthetic. Wallace again stars, as do Andy Serkis and YouTuber Charlie McDonnell.

'Volume' trailer

"(The contrast of old and new influences) had a huge influence and was something I went to great lengths to capture, sonically," Housden tells me when I ask him about the modernized Robin Hood theme at play. "I really wanted to play with this idea of an old story being told in a new way, so to that end I decided to invest in a range of period instrumentation to include in the score. Not necessarily medieval instruments themselves, but they had to have that sort of tone to them. I used a mandolin, a dulcimer, an Irish harp, an erhu, and many other elements to create various textures, and a feel of something written in the past."

Video game soundtracks are far from the proverbial poorer cousins of scores for the film world, as outstanding arrangements in titles like Journey, the Halo series and BioWare's Dragon Age saga (and many more—you'll certainly have your favorites) prove. BAFTA winners in the category of Best Original Music have included BioShock Infinite (2014) and Heavy Rain (2011), while Austin Wintory's work for Journey bagged itself a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 2013 awards, the first time a game had been included in a category beside movies. Housden believes that working in games, versus films, provides composers with greater freedom to get creative.

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch our film, The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'


"The game soundtrack world is fantastic. It offers artists opportunities to take risks and create music that you simply wouldn't hear in other mediums. Films need to make money. You have the odd niche success, but by and large the major studios are all looking for their next financial hit or franchise. As such there's very little scope to be exploratory with the music or to break away from tried-and-tested formulas. Whilst that's perhaps true of some triple-A game titles as well, generally the game industry encourages and rewards innovation and creativity in all aspects of development, not least the music.

"I do think there's a problem with the term 'game music,' though. It's music which is used for games, sure, but you're talking about the same world-class musicians being recorded in the same studios, engineered by the same mixers—who are the best at what they do—as you find in the film world. There are a wealth of Hollywood composers whose credits now include game works as well, so there's really nothing to choose between a top game score and a top film score anymore.

"Journey breaking through into the mainstream was certainly a step in the right direction, but it hasn't brought the wall down and game scores deserve far more recognition than they currently receive. That being said, the landscape has improved significantly over the past few years and I believe it will only continue to do so as time passes and more and more exemplary scores are created."

Listen to three tracks from Housden's Volume score below—and order the full soundtrack via iTunes here.

Over on Noisey: Video Game Music Demystified

Volume is available on August 18, 2015 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PC, and Mac. More information at the game's official website. Housden's soundtrack is released today through Laced Records.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

Explaining Donald Trump to the Rest of the World

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Donald Trump is a self-obsessed lunatic billionaire with a big unhinged mouth and hair that was airdropped onto his head. In other words: he's the most American thing to happen to the since McDonald's started serving apple pies in those little rectangular boxes. Understandably, the rest of the world has some questions about who the hell Donald Trump is, why he's running for president, and what the fuck is wrong with us for letting it all happen.

So, in the spirit of international cooperation, we asked 10 of VICE's global editors to send us their most pressing questions about the phenomenon that is Trump 2016. Below is our attempt at answering them.

More from VICE on Donald Trump:
The Real Reason Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President
Wait, What Would Happen If Donald Trump Actually Became President?
The Noisey Editorial Board Is Proud to Endorse Donald Trump for President
How Donald Trump Explains America


GERMANY: Whats up with his hair?
Great question! When he was younger, the Donald, a nickname given to him by his former wife Ivana, accidentally, during a newspaper interview—like, she genuinely just called him "The Donald"—was widely regarded as handsome: tall, blond, and strong-featured, filling a decade of tabloid covers with his marriages to leggy, blond former models.

But as he got older, Trump's hair got... kind of weird. The real-estate mogul has been asked about his hair over the years, and he mostly dodges the question. On Twitter, he wrote, "As everybody knows, but the haters & losers refuse to acknowledge, I do not wear a 'wig.' My hair may not be perfect but it's mine."

In an interview with Playboy, Trump explained his daily hair routine: "I get up, take a shower and wash my hair. Then I read the newspapers and watch the news on television, and slowly the hair dries. It takes about an hour. I don't use a blow-dryer. Once it's dry I comb it. Once I have it the way I like it—even though nobody else likes it—I spray it and it's good for the day."

Donald Trump's hair is a good metaphor for Donald Trump: If he likes it, he doesn't care what anybody else thinks.

CANADA: Is he a rich version of Rob Ford?
Now, Canada: let's not get carried away. You guys elected Rob Ford. Like, you put him in public office. Trump isn't actually a politician. He's a reality television star, and his politics is more like performance art. Also, Trump is an American cultural icon based on the fact that he is rich—so he can't really be just the rich version of someone else. His whole shtick is that he isn't a regular guy: he's a rich guy who regular guys can look up and admire, because they understand him. Rob Ford wants everyone to think he's just some schmo who happens to be mayor. Which, honestly, is pretty accurate.

Also, Rob Ford got videotaped smoking crack.

SWEDEN: Is it true that Donald Trump is completely independent from lobbyists because he's so rich?
Also a good question. One of the main justifications given for Donald Trump's presidential campaign is that he is independently wealthy, and therefore can't be bullied and bought by the lobbyists and campaign donors pulling the levers of the Washington machine.

Trump himself made this argument during the first Republican primary debate earlier this month, distilling how American politics is rigged. "I will tell you that our system is broken," Trump told the audience. "I gave to many people before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call I will give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them and they are there for me."

He also pointed out that he has donated to most of the other GOP candidates on stage. What Trump seemed to be saying to Republican voters was: Yes, the system is fucked, but would you rather have a president who is part of that, or who has been on the outside and knows how the system can be gamed?

Still, there are a couple of problems with Trump's wealth insofar as it affects his status as a politician. The first is that much of Trump's money is tied up in assets, rather than being liquid, and the money that is liquid he intends to spend on his campaign. It's also unclear how rich he actually is, though he's almost certainly not as rich as he claims to be.

And finally, Trump has never missed an opportunity to make more money in the past. I don't want to conjecture about the likelihood that Trump will be influenced by lobbyists, but let's just say that, if he's as tied up with the mob as veteran Trump reporter Wayne Barrett claims he is, then lobbyists seem like a step up.

UNITED KINGDOM: Which demographic does he appeal to?
Perhaps the most alarming thing about Trump's presidential campaign is his massive and apparently enduring popularity among conservative voters. For weeks, Trump has been leading in Republican primary polls, and the latest RealClearPolitics average shows him with 22 percent support from GOP voters, nearly 12 points ahead of Jeb Bush, the next runner-up. And nothing Trump says or does—whether it's accusing Mexican immigrants of being criminals, or making derisive comments about Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle—seems to hurt his numbers.

The question, then, is who are these people? According to polls—and our own conversations with Trump supporters—they are conservative voters who are fed up with politics as usual, and like the idea of an independently successful businessman running the country instead of another jowly good ol' boy senator or governor.

There are a lot of problems with this idea — for one thing, Trump isn't a very good businessman, just the world's greatest self-promoter. But it does help illustrate why Trump has gotten so much support, despite the fact that most people who aren't Republican voters—and some who are—think he is a clown.

HOLLAND: How did he originally make his money?
Real estate. Trump comes from a New York real-estate family that made bank developing land in Queens and Brooklyn. Trump took it to the next level, breaking into the Manhattan game in the 1970s. As his company—and reputation—grew, Trump added gambling and golf courses to his portfolio, with properties in Atlantic City and Florida.

But in the new millennium, following a handful of corporate bankruptcies, Trump has became less involved in the day-to-day wheeling and dealings of the business world. Instead, he started to make much of his money off the Trump brand, licensing his gold-plated name to buildings, suits, mattresses, beauty pageants, and of course, The Apprentice and its spin-offs.

ROMANIA: How do his politics differ from the politics of the Bush family
The Bush boys — we're talking George H.W., the father and former president; George W., the younger brother and former president; and Jeb, the current presidential candidate — are Republican party stalwarts, consummate Washington Insiders who've been circling conservative politics for decades. The Bushs hobnob, they make friends—and they know what to say.

Trump, on the other hand, sees himself as someone outside the political establishment, and has been a constant source of consternation for the GOP Establishment since he started talking about President Obama's birth certificate in 2012.

The Bushs also tend to be somewhat moderate, as far as the Republicans go, especially on issues like immigration reform and education. Trump is further to the right, sounding the alarm on the national debt and the "border crisis" with rhetoric so inflated that it's hard to take him seriously. Trump also hates the Bushs, and takes every opportunity he finds to attack Jeb, his current Bush opponent, in interviews and on social media.

Put another way, if Jeb's the class president, Trump is the wild-eyed jock who gets stuffs him in a locker.

FRANCE: To us in France, all US politicians seem like Donald Trump. What's everyone's problem with this guy specifically?
This is funny, coming from the country that produced the National Front. Jean-Marie Le Pen makes Trump look appealing. Trump is openly racist, sexist, and ultraconservative, plus loud, bizarre, and quite possibly crazy, and while there are plenty of Republican politicians who fit some of these descriptions, very few who nail them all. And Trump far more entertaining than your average right-winger: there aren't a ton of politicians who have mastered Twitter the way The Donald has. He's like a parody of what people think about Republican politicians come to life.

SPAIN: Why does he have a star in Hollywood's walk of fame?
Because he's a reality television star. He's also in the WWE Hall of Fame.


MEXICO: What do America's Latinos think of him?
Suffice it to say, as a group, Latinos are not huge fans of Donald Trump, at least since he started calling undocumented immigrants rapists and got into a war of words with Univision. When the Spanish-language television network polled Latino voters nationwide, it found that 80 percent were offended by Trump. It's been so bad that there's concern Trump is setting the entire GOP back with Latino voters, a demographic the party has been actively trying to court for years.

DENMARK: Is there a chance of him winning?
No.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter.

Shooting the Aura of the Australian Outback

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All image by Tim Hillier

It's been less than a year since we last chatted to photographer Tim Hillier, but he's been a busy guy over the last few months. He recently published a new series of photos of the Outback called Domestic Connecting. The images were shot through the windows of tiny single-engine planes as he criss-crossed remote areas of Australia while working on the Indigenous Hip Hop Project. The photos paint rainbow-like colors across the landscape thanks to an effect Hillier discovered accidentally after leaving the polarizer on his camera while shooting from a plane. We talked to Hillier about some of his experiences working in one of the most remote and unique places on the globe.

VICE: The photos for this series have some crazy colors going on. Can you explain birefringence in layman's terms?
Tim Hillier: It took me ages to figure out what it's called. It's to do with a particular property of certain plastics and glass, and how the different crystal breakdown in materials bend light in certain ways. You can see it in a lot of perspex on an angle.

Did you discover it by accident?
It was a pure accident from leaving the polarizer on my lens while trying to shoot out a plane window. I've tried to make my own plane windows to shoot in the studio, but it doesn't quite work. It's possibly to do with the altitude or air pressure or something. I've managed to do it in some cars with tinted windows.

The images remind me of Aura photography. The pictures are obviously visually beautiful, but do they have a deeper meaning to you?
As much time as I've spent in the Outback in the last couple years, it's still a mystery to me. The stuff that goes on out there blows me away every time. You see the most beautiful, crazy stuff, plus the stories and experiences I've had of being in that wide open space—it's just the great unknown, the Never Never.

Can you give me a story that fits that description?
We were at a place called Gapuwiyak and we organized kids to do Bungul (a traditional dance), which has two parts: the Dhuwa and the Yirritja. After two hours of Dhuwa, they changed to the Yirritja and then it started raining. So after three hours of traditional dance and us filming and taking photos, hanging out, the kids ran home and we packed up. It was amazing, we'd never seen anything like it before. Later on at night, around 1:00 AM, we were sitting around and you could hear the kids playing again, like singing and dancing, clap sticks, didgeridoos. We just assumed the kids were so happy and had such a good time that they wanted to keep it going. But the next morning we bumped into the kids and asked about it; they said it wasn't them, it was the ancestors that wanted to keep it going. Other people had heard it too, I could hear it as clear as day and no one admitted to doing it.

That sends chills up my spine.
That's the kind of stuff that builds up the mystery of the desert. The more I know, the more I know that I don't know.

Would you consider Domestic Connections a sequel to Holding Patterns or something stand-alone?
Holding Patterns was photos of skyscapes around Australasia shot on expired film. It's a follow on in colors and scheme, but it's more about the desert and Australia, so it's very closely related but not a direct sequel. It's more about the subject matter and less abstract.

It seems like your photography is becoming more abstract. Is this a path you intend to keep following?
I feel like there're two sides to the photography I want to do right now. I've got my work that's more documentary style and works better in books and articles, and the newer stuff that I'm working on in series for galleries.

What's next?
The third part in the series is based on flying in and flying out and high vis uniforms and stuff. It's still very open-ended but will hopefully be ready next year.

Domestic Connecting is opening at Tristian Koenig in Collingwood, New Zealand, on Wednesday, August 19.

Tim was interviewed by Ben Thomson. Follow him on Instagram.

VICE Vs Video Games: Discussing the Plausibility of Video Game Jailbreak with a Real-Life Escapee

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A screenshot from 'The Escapists.' All screens via Steam

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Prison Break was a load of rubbish.

It was semi-entertaining for, what, three quarters of a season ten years ago? And then the plot spiraled into something about a tattoo and a dead cat and then Michael and Lincoln escaped and then...

And then it ran for another three whole fucking seasons. That's 57 redundant episodes of unadulterated guff. Worse still, it seems that Fox, to my ceaseless dismay, plans to revive the series some six years after it left our TVs in what can only be described as tragic news.

In other more positive news, Mouldy Toof Studios' prison 'em up The Escapists is now available on all current-gen systems. Chris Davis, the game's creator, tells me that his first foray into the world of video game development was originally set to be a schoolyard-based game: an homage to Spectrum classic Skool Daze, a personal favorite of his.

I really like The Escapists, therefore it's through gritted teeth and with steely ambivalence that I acknowledge the following: what steered Davis towards a prison-based game in the first place was Prison Break.

"It was midway through 2013 and The Escapists originally started out as a slightly different game within a different setting—it was a school-based game," Davis explains. "I used to play a school game back in the days of the Spectrum and I wanted to make a tribute to that. It had the routines of school, you could play truant [hooky], and get in fights with kids."

"I think I was watching Prison Break or something similar one day and decided I needed to change the setting to a prison, because I could see the fun with trying to escape. It's not really been touched upon in many games."

Davis tells me how he researched cinema, books, and countless documentaries while building his debut project. He spent entire evenings exploring Google and scouring Netflix, understanding the layouts of all types of existing and historical prisons, studying the in-house rules, and reading up on famous prison breaks. The San Pancho desert prison level in The Escapists is a direct tribute to that goddamned television show. "I had quite a few evenings of locking myself in a room and researching all night," he says.

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch VICE's film, 'Young Reoffenders'


But just how authentic is this interpretation of prison? Granted, The Escapists depicts routine, hostility, and institutionalized commerce, but it was never intended to be overly authentic. "Because it's a very light-hearted prison game, we knew that kids would be playing it," Davis affirms. Some of the escape routes on offer are quite clearly vestiges of Hollywood cinema, but is there any plausibility in the schemes the game offers conniving players?

"Escape? Well it's not like the bloody Shawshank Redemption, that's for sure," says David, a Glaswegian who once served an eight-year prison sentence for armed robbery. I spoke to David (a previously agreed pseudonym) once before about his motives for engaging in the criminal activity that led to his incarceration. During our conversation, he told me that towards the end of his time inside he was moved to the open-prison HMP Castle Huntly. According to the Scottish Prison Service, there have been no recorded escape attempts in the last few decades. Absconding however, failing to return from temporary release, falls under the same bracket. With minimal supervision, such is the nature of open-prisons, David was granted day-release just months before the end of his sentence. He chose to abscond.

"I absconded, as they call it, which [means] that I basically didn't do what I was told," David says. "I went to my mum's who was still living at the time, and then I went to my mate's who was looking after my dog. We had a few beers and a smoke so I'd already breached my bail conditions so I thought, fuck it, and stayed out. You see stories in the papers of guys fleeing the country to Spanish islands or wherever these days, but I was young and daft—I was hauled off my mate's couch in a flat in the Saltmarket (an area in Glasgow's city center) the following day."

"I'd never even been to an airport back then, so Spain wasn't on my mind, but I probably should've put more thought into it. I ended up getting my sentence extended by six months, which was almost unheard of back then—most folk got a slap on the wrists. I think the bastards had it in for me!"

I ask David if he ever considered attempting escape when he was housed in regular security prison. "Everyone thinks about. Everyone talks about it, in fact. But actually trying it, and succeeding, well, that's another thing. It's not like the movies like everyone probably thinks. It's not that straight forward."

Watch on VICE News: Inside El Chapo's Escape Tunnel

"What about video games?" I ask, before explaining the premise of The Escapists. Given the nature of our last conversation, David remarks that I appear "obsessed with relating everything to computer games." He's absolutely right, but he nicely decides to entertain me nonetheless as I show him three successful escape videos depicting various levels in The Escapists, before asking his opinion as to their credibility in reality.

Escape from Center Perks (courtesy of YouTube user DaStormBringa)

Plausibility: "This reminds me of open prison, in that the inmates are given a lot of space," David says. "I'm not so sure about cutting a hole in the fence, given that it'd probably be just as easy to walk straight out the front door, but if you had time to do it out of sight of the guards you might get away with this one. Again, as it's an open prison I reckon getting someone to drop off a wee pair of wire cutters would sort you out—going through with plastic knives would take forever."

Escape from Shankton State Pen (courtesy of YouTube user Shambles11)

Plausibility: "This looks a bit further fetched, but to be honest I still think it could be done with the right preparation," says David. "I'd never manage it," he laughs while patting his belly, "because you'd need to be fast once you're out in the grounds. One thing I think is strange is that there's no one looking to grass you in. You know yourself, Glasgow's always had a bit of a gangland culture and it was worse, as far as I'm concerned, in the 1970s. It's the same inside."

He continues, "There was a guy from my street that I was always fighting with out here, but he was my best mate when we were in there. We're from The Calton (an area in Glasgow's East End) so we stuck together. When I met him in [a nightclub] a few months after getting out he stuck the nut on me! It's just one of them things. It's different rules.

"But aye, this is getting a bit Hollywood, but I dunno. Could be done."

Escape from HMP Irongate (courtesy of YouTube user Roarke Suibhne)

Plausibility: "Are you fucking mad?" David asks. "Did I not say it's nothing like The Shawshank Redemption? A fucking grappling hook and a homemade boat? You'd be as well sneaking in a gun or a machete and fighting your way out—there's more chance that'd work for you! I'm telling you, man."

In the absence of gangs and snitches, David asks me if the game includes another element that was more than consistent with his time in prison: drugs. Chris Davis admits that he "...kept away from the more grim side of prison life—the drugs and so on," and there are also no in-game gangs. Again, he points to the fact that kids might play it, and thus didn't want to lead players down routes that might reflect darker themes. Besides sleeping pills, there are no drugs whatsoever in The Escapists.

From VICE News: Going Inside a Maximum-Security Prison That's Rehabilitating Criminals

"I was offered more drugs in there than I've ever been in my life, particularly in the open prison," David says. "One day I was lying in my cell during rec hours, minding my own business, and some idiot asked me if I wanted a couple of eccies. Eccies were this new thing back then but, 'What the fuck would I want with a couple of eccies if I'm in here?' I told him. Think he was planning to break out and head straight to the dancing!"

"Na, all joking aside, I did see a few guys who were as clean as a whistle drug-wise going in, and coming out the other end more or less junkies. These days there's AA and drug counseling and whatnot in there, but not back then. It's rife."

Altogether, The Escapists never tries to be an ultra-realistic interpretation of prison life—a fact reflected in its pixel characters and funny one-liners. It's a video game mirroring Hollywood's depiction of an institution, which just so happens to include elements that resonate with a former inmate—most likely down to Chris Davis's extensive research. From what David's shared—and as you'd probably imagine—prison sounds brutal. He assures me he regrets the decisions that led him there and that I should behave and seize any opportunities in life that'll keep me from following his path.

Which is no doubt good advice. But the thought of an impending fifth season of Prison Break makes me wonder if I'd benefit from some time away.

The Escapists is out now for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.

Follow Joe Donnelly on Twitter.

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